Windeck Castle (Windeck)
Windeck Castle was a villa on the Windeck castle ruins . It was built in 1859 and burned down in 1945.
Prussia sold the Windeck castle ruins in 1852 to the royal Prussian district administrator of Waldbröl , Oscar Danzier . He was interested in historical buildings and their preservation. So he had clean-up work done and paths and stairs built. The ruins were converted into a park landscape. In the years 1859/60 Danzier had a slate-covered castle house built on the south-east tip of the castle hill on the foundations and vaults of the old castle. The so-called "Windeck Castle" was built in a medieval style and therefore had high stepped gables.
In 1881 the castle house burned down, but was restored in the following years. With the marriage of Danzier's daughter Arnoldine to the Italian banker Andrea Caminneci from Palermo , Windeck came to the Caminneci family, who had the building expanded to double its previous size in a south-westerly direction in 1899/1900. After the expansion, the now four- story castle had four towers and was adorned with tufa decorations in the Gothic style. The surrounding park was extended with rose and rock gardens and equipped with fountains, stone tables and stone benches.
After Andrea Caminneci's death in 1940, Windeck Castle was rented out furnished. Its vaulted cellar served as an air raid shelter for the population of Oberwindeck during the Second World War due to its strong outer walls. The palace complex was set on fire by American artillery shelling at Easter 1945. In the course of the clean-up work that lasted until the end of the 1960s, the remains of Windeck Castle were completely torn down because the old castle ruins were considered to be historically more valuable and worth preserving.
Coordinates: 50 ° 48 ′ 49.5 ″ N , 7 ° 34 ′ 44 ″ E